Articles in Cartography
New Maps of India—and of the Indian Economy
New political maps of India are now needed, as the state of Orissa has officially changed the English spelling of its name to “Odisha.” The new name, however, does not imply a change in pronunciation. As the Wikipedia notes, “… the name Orissa is closer to the actual Oriya pronunciation of the name, whereas Odisha is an intentionally archaising transcription.”
Although …
Mappery and the Problems with “True” and “Real” Maps
The useful website Mappery “was created for map enthusiasts to find, explore, and discuss great maps. Anyone can contribute maps, comments, and ratings to the site.” The site contains numerous maps, and is certainly worth exploring. Thankfully, users seldom exploit the site for propagandistic purposes. Mappery does contain, however, a few problematic political maps, such as the “Real Map of …
French speakers in California, Past and Present
When it comes to people who speak French at home, California has only the third largest population of all U.S. states. California’s francophone population shrank by about 4% between 2000 and 2005. But historically, the situation was quite different, as French used to be an important and widely spoken tongue in the state.
The New York Times’ Flubbed China Cartograms
An interesting story in today’s (April 9) New York Times—“Hello, Cambodia: Wary of Events in China, Foreign Investors Head to the South”—is illustrated in the print edition with two striking cartograms of eastern Asia, one of which shows population and the other economic output. The cartogram legends claims that “countries and Chinese provinces are sized according to population” and, respectively …
North American English Dialects: Bad Map – Or Fantastic Map?
An internet search of “bad map” returns, among many other examples, Rick Aschmann’s map of North American English Dialects, reproduced here. Critics complain that the map is so busy and complicated as to be almost unreadable. But what the map lacks in grace and style, it makes up for in detail. On Aschmann’s own website, the map is large and …
Mapping Evangelical Christian Missionary Efforts
It is difficult to find maps depicting religious adherence in areas outside of the historical boundaries of the major universalizing faiths, such as much of sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania. Many such places, however, are characterized today by profound religious change, as missionaries seek converts and as syncretic forms of worship emerge. Some proselytizing organizations, however, maintain intricate maps of their …
Punjabi and the Problems of Mapping Dialect Continua
The Wikipedia list of the world’s most widely spoken languages, by mother tongue, puts Punjabi in tenth place, with its roughly 100 million native speakers exceeding the figures given for German, French, Italian, Turkish, Persian and many other well-known languages. The Wikipedia article on the Punjabi language stresses its growing appeal, noting that, “The influence of Punjabi as a cultural …
French Wine Consumption and Other Intriguing Maps from Vintage Printables
In conducting a simple internet search for geopolitical maps, I was surprised to see multiple returns of a map of French wine consumption in 1873. The map in question is found on a site called “Vintage Printable,” which aims to:
provide free, public domain/out-of-copyright images for you to print or download. Most of the images are vintage naturalist or scientific illustration, …
Remaining Language Families and Geographical Language Groups
Today’s post concludes the brief series on world maps of language families, based on abstracting information from a Wikipedia language-family map to make convenient classroom maps. The only remaining category on the map that is a legitimate language family, however, is Eskimo-Aleut. The others are actually geographical groupings of several different families.
With only around 100,000 people speaking its languages, Eskimo-Aleut …
Altaic and Related Languages?
Today’s language-family maps take up the controversial issue of Altaic. Several decades ago, many linguists grouped the Altaic languages with the Uralic languages, but that thesis is no longer tenable. Now many linguists are expressing doubt about the Altaic family itself. Languages placed within this group have a number of common features, but such features seem to many experts to …
World Maps of Language Families, Continued
Today’s post provides five more language family maps, based again on the Wikipedia “Human Language Families Map” found here. I must again warn that the boundaries here are approximate, and that many small areas characterized by languages in a given family have been ignored. Some areas simply defy linguistic mapping at this scale; the scattered Uralic languages found in the …
World Maps of Language Families
For teaching a class on the history and geography of the world’s major language families, good linguistic maps are essential. Unfortunately, serviceable maps that depict only language families are difficult to find. Most images available online show a combination of families and sub-families, splitting Indo-European, for example, into its main divisions. Such a portrayal is of little use for demonstrating …
Maps as an Instrument of Propaganda, Part 1
Maps are ideally supposed to be objective depictions of reality, but they can also be used as an instrument of propaganda, portraying the world not as it is but as it is imagined by the cartographer. A recent post on the Russian historical website Diletant.ru includes a collection of such maps (posted also on the Propaganda History website), referred to as “symbolic maps”.
Using Series of Maps to Represent Changes in Time: How Diabetes Swept the U.S.
Maps are generally two-dimensional representations of the world, so by their nature they cannot represent time. Yet often it is interesting to see how the spatial distribution of a given parameter changes over time. Some creative ways have been developed to track temporal changes through maps. One such technique is designing a series of similar maps representing different time points and using the same color scheme to depict the scope or intensity of a given feature.
Porcelain Atlas of the Dutch Provinces at the Het Loo Palace, the Netherlands
As our readers know, we at the GeoCurrents team always keep an eye open for innovative, useful, and elegant maps. Naturally, I was mesmerized on my recent trip to the Netherlands to see a set of detailed maps done on… porcelain plates!
Terranova: The Black Petaltail - A Novel
Diversity Amid Globalization: World Regions, Environment, Development (5th Edition)
Globalization and Diversity: Geography of a Changing World (3rd Edition)
